At this stage, I am trying to look through each report and provide some general feedback that will help you make improvements. Several of the reports are looking pretty good, and there is planty of time to whip the rest of them into shape. Remember to edit often!
To improve your report you should
try to...
under each heading, try to group your information in paragraphs that begin with a sentence that lets the reader know the subtopic. For example, if you are writing about the demographics of the community, you might start with a sentence such as:
The community around MYSCHOOL is relatively poor. Most of the houses in the community have less than 5 rooms, and families typically share one car (citation for fact 1, citation for fact 2). The median household income in MYCOMMUNITY is $22,000 which is much lower than the state median income of $50,000. Out of a population of 18,000 people, 26% live in poverty (citation). The poverty of the community is exacerbated by several problems, including lack of education (only 49% of MYCOMMUNITY residents graduated from high school) and a large immigrant pupulation (64% use english as a second language) (citation for fact 1, citation for fact 2).
rely on the sources that we explored in class, e.g. Information Works, Kids Count, and the Census Bureau.
cite every fact (piece of information) at the end of its sentence using APA Style. EDITORS: You can check for APA style by looking at references, they should all start with Authors' Names (Publication Date).
For example:
The use of wikis in college classes is just beginning (Parker & Chao, 2007).
The corresponding citation at the end of the paper would be:
Parker, K. R., & Chao, J. T. (2007). Wiki as a Teaching Tool. Interdisciplinary Journal of Knowledge and Learning Objects, 3.
"tweak" the appearance of your report to improve its presentation, e.g. make sure all paragraphs are uniformly spaced, all styles are correct, etc.
read your report for errors that a spellchecker will not catch, e.g. "and" instead of "an."
and try not to...
cite less reliable sources, e.g. commercial sites (e.g. elook) or Wikipedia.
include hyperlinks to sources within text of paper.
present information in bullets instead of paragraphs.
string factual statements within a paragraph without a unifying topic sentence.
Wikispace Hints
If you use firefox as your browser, it has a Word-style spell checker built in.
If you are citing extremely long URLs, these will make your report's margins extremely wide. You can fix this by replacing the long URL with a shortened version that just acts as the hyperlink. See the reference section in Bryce's paper for an example.
Feedback on Context Reports
Hi all,
At this stage, I am trying to look through each report and provide some general feedback that will help you make improvements. Several of the reports are looking pretty good, and there is planty of time to whip the rest of them into shape. Remember to edit often!
To improve your report you should
try to...
The community around MYSCHOOL is relatively poor. Most of the houses in the community have less than 5 rooms, and families typically share one car (citation for fact 1, citation for fact 2). The median household income in MYCOMMUNITY is $22,000 which is much lower than the state median income of $50,000. Out of a population of 18,000 people, 26% live in poverty (citation). The poverty of the community is exacerbated by several problems, including lack of education (only 49% of MYCOMMUNITY residents graduated from high school) and a large immigrant pupulation (64% use english as a second language) (citation for fact 1, citation for fact 2).
For example:
The use of wikis in college classes is just beginning (Parker & Chao, 2007).
The corresponding citation at the end of the paper would be:
Parker, K. R., & Chao, J. T. (2007). Wiki as a Teaching Tool. Interdisciplinary Journal of Knowledge and Learning Objects, 3.
and try not to...
Wikispace Hints